Group 3, Design Process and General Update

Inclusive Design: The system indicates a punishment imbalance by changing colors of the room in addition to a voice command

Came up with design of house product, inspired by Amazon Echo

Three design ideas (insert sketches):

Jarvis style (system is the house)

Interactive panels

Echo style

Punishment ideas:

Passive aggressive (reminds you late for meetings)

Physical

Punishment (taking away internet)

Prototype Ideas

Software of emotion categorization

Doll house and LEDS

Our biggest design obstacle was definitely creating the world. Obviously our initial world was a time in the future when the idea of an eye for an eye would be taken to literal extremes. We have since modified this idea. Our current view of the world we want to work with is the present day in which one family believes that it will be beneficial to their family dynamic to follow this eye for an eye principle and as a product of such they employ the use of this system we call EVE. EVE is a highly intelligent system that is capable of monitoring humans and quantifying their emotional well being on a scale. It comes into play whenever a human intentionally or unintentionally causes harm, distress or some other emotional problem to someone else. We went through several iterations of what EVE should be able to pass judgement on and ultimately we would like to the see the system implemented in such a way that it can handle every and any case.

This leads to the point that further develops the world that we are using for this scenario. In the future we have decided that humans will have completely adopted this system through continual use which has created well embedded habits. Thereby the system becomes ingrained in each human. This lead us to consider the fact that the system might then become dated, obsolete and generally useless. However as with current society there will always be outliers, so for the purposes of the future that we are working towards the EVE system has become the central component of the judiciary system.

The design considerations for EVE have definitely been the bulk of what we have been working on as it is the main aspect of our project. A big obstacle that we have had to tackle was determining where the “revolution” aspect would come into play with our design. We began to research instances of the judicial system falling short or being completely absent and to be quite frank the stories that we found were entirely overwhelming. We read news articles from people getting away with murder and manslaughter because they were deemed “too affluent” to know any better, and articles about people who get away with intentional fraud and planned their strategies around this because they know that getting caught will only result in a fine that is a mere fraction of the money that they can make.

In all of these cases we were seeing instances of people cheating, beating and otherwise getting around the judicial system for a variety of circumstances. Several of the cases involved crimes so heinous that we as a group decided that there had to be a better way to determine how people were punished for breaking the law and this is how we sculpted the family which resides in our world. They too have seen the horrors that happen on a daily basis and designed this eye for an eye system as a way of revolting against the judicial system. They want to be able to make this work in their family to prove that it is a better system so that one day it could be used on a global scale.

One of our first ideas when designing EVE was to determine what type of form it would take. We wanted something that could easily control aspects of the house while still maintaining a useful day to day property. We also wanted something that while highly integratable did not cause an eyesore or stick out too much, after all this is a house with a fairly average family living there. We looked into products that have already been created to monitor and control household items and reviewed the Amazon Echo as well as the Nest. We considered using something like this that would just be a single physical interface that would be present in one place in the home but soon decided that this would not be sophisticated or versatile enough to handle the complicated tasks that we would be setting forth.

EVE should be able to constantly video monitor the humans in the home as well as track any audio activity so as not to miss anything verbal that may cause distress to another inhabitant.

A second idea was to interface it using interactive panels that could go on the wall in every room of the house and function very similar to a daily planner, thermostat, painting or any other piece of furniture that is not given a second thought on a daily basis. A big design plus for this approach was complete integration to the point that the family would really never think of EVE as a secondary system but as part of the house.

Finally we considered interfacing it similar to JARVIS from the ironman movies. The main problem that we ran into with this one was not only attempting to create a physical prototype, but it could be construed as disturbing, god-like or obtrusive to home life.

We finally settled on option two of having interactive panels throughout the house. We believe this will cause a better integration into the family and will create a more inviting human-like system. The panels can be used to check schedules, weather, control lighting and even manage locations of members of the family. By having these secondary characteristics it allows us to underplay the main purpose of the system and thereby create an experience that feels less detached. As EVE is fully integrated into the home, it is able to control the ambient lighting in every room, this plays into the strengths of detecting problems and can use the lighting to mimic the current situation. I.e; A current problem the light will take on a red hue, if there is an unresolved conflict the lights may be shifted to yellow or green and a gentle blue would be the calmed state.

We next wanted to determine how the system was going to enforce the punishments that it imposed upon the inhabitants of the home. As humans we obviously have free will and if we are unwilling to do something that EVE believes is morally correct the system should incentivize the person to perform the directed task. We believe that a more passive aggressive approach would be more beneficial. If the “punishment” is too harsh or direct it may become terrifying, or cause the inhabitants to want to uninstall the technology. We did however consider everything from cutting off the internet for an hour to placing shocking plates in the floor that could shock the family members if a directive was not carried out. The latter was obviously far too extreme. The two that we finally settled on were picked because we found that they would not only be useful in incentivizing someone to follow instructions but because they were minimally invasive and emotionally scarring to a minimal extent. We decided that if EVE was ignored that she would passive aggressively “get back at you” by reminding you about meetings too late or with insufficient time to get there on time, or misquoting you the temperature outside as well as a myriad of other passive aggressive actions. We also decided that because EVE controls the entire house, should she feel it necessary can cut the bandwidth on the internet. This is probably the most frustrating thing to happen to someone and would more than incentivize them to carry out tasks in the future.

Finally when it comes to prototyping we had to figure out the best way to get our point across in a way that is both feasible, cheap and understandable. Our initial idea was to try to code out the software that EVE would run in a very primitive way, but this quickly became overly complicated and still in the realm of the impossible for the timeline that we are working with. We were able to settle on a physical mock-up using a dollhouse as our family home and a series of LED’s connected to a well programmed arduino to indicate what scenario was being storyboarded at the time. We are currently in the build stage of this prototype and project it to be done within the next week.

Prototyping Pictures

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We are creating a supplemental video that will allow us to get across the finer points of the system that the mock-up will not be able to cover such as; confrontations between family members, punishments, interactions between the system and those not in the family and refusal to carry out system orders.